No More Learning

Some are driven in their de-
spair to get rich by learning to. exploit the demand not only for great minds but also for wild men, profound novelists, puffed-up lovers, and leaders of the new generation; others wear an invisible royal crown on their heads that they will not remove under any circum- stances, prepared with embittered modesty not to expect the value of their creation to he seen in its true light before two to ten centuries have passed. They all feel that it is a terrible tragedy for the nation that its truly great men can never become a part of its living culture because they are too far ahead of it.
It must be emphasized, however, that the minds under considera- tion so far have been those of an aesthetic bent, since there is a con- siderable difference in the ways the mind relates to the world. While the aesthetic mind wants the same sort of admiration accorded to Goethe and . Michelangelo, Napoleon and Luther, hardly anyone today knows the name of the man who gave humanity the untold blessing of anesthesia; nobody searches the lives of Gauss, Euler, or Maxwell for an Immortal Beloved, and hardly anyone cares where Lavoisier ~d Cardanus were born and died. Instead, we learn how their ideas and inventions were further developed by the ideas and inventions of other, equally uninteresting people, and continually concentrate on their achievements, which live on through others long after the brief flame of the individual has burned out. One is amazed at first to see how sharp the distinction is between two kinds of human endeavor, but soon enough counterexamples come to mind, and it begins to look like the most natural of differentiations. Familiar custom assures us it is the difference between person and
work, between the greatness of a human being and that of a cause, between culture and knowledge, humanity and nature: Work and outstanding productivity do not increase moral stature, nor being a man in the eyes ofheaven, nor those unanalyzable lessons oflife that are handed down only by the example of statesmen, heroes, saints, singers, and, one must admit, movie actors-in short, that great irra- tional power in which the poet, too, feels he has a part, as long as he believes in what he says and holds fast to his belief that whatever his circumstances, his voice is the voice of the inner life, the blood, the heart, the nation, Europe, or all mankind. It is the mysterious whole of which he feels himself to be the medium, while the others are merely rummaging around in the comprehensible-and this is a mis-
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Si(')n one must believe in before one can learn to see it! What assures us of this is a voice of truth, certainly, but isn't there something odd about this truth? For where one looks less at the person than at the cause, there is, remarkably, always a fresh person to carry on the cause, while on the other hand, wherever the emphasis is on the per- son, there is always the feeling after a certain level has been reached that there is no longer anyone who measures up anymore, and that true greatness lies in the past.
Each and every one of the men gathered at Diotima's that night was a vessel of the whole, and that was a lot all at once. Writing and thinking, activities as natural to man as swimming is to a duckling, was something they practiced as a profession, and they were, in fact, really better at it than most. But what was it all for? What they did was beautiful, it was great, it was unique, but so much uniqueness bore the collective breath of mortality and the graveyard, having no evident meaning or purpose, ancestors or progeny. Countless re- membered experiences, myriads of crisscrossing vibrations of the spirit, were gathered in these heads, which were stuck ! p<:e a carpet weaver's needles in a carpet extending without seams or edges all around them in every direction and somewhere, at some random place, creating a pattern that seemed to repeat itself elsewhere but was actually a little different. But is this the proper use of oneself, to set such a little patch on eternity?
It would probably be saying far too much to say that Diotima had grasped all this, but she felt ~e wind ofthe grave over the fields of the spirit, and the nearer this first day drew to its close, the deeper she slipped into discouragement. Luckily, it brought to her mind a certain hopelessness Arnheim had expressed on another occasion, when they had spoken of such things, though at the time she had not quite grasped his meaning; now her friend ·was away on a trip, but she remembered how he had warned her not to place too great hopes in this gathering. So it was actually Arnheim's melancholy into which she was drifting, which made it ultimately an almost sensu- ously pensive and flattering pleasure. Musing on his prophetic words, she wondered: "Isn't it, deep down, the pessimism people of action are always bound to feel when they come in contact with those who traffic in words? "
. SCIENCE SMILING INTO ITS BEARD, OR A FIRST FULL-:DRESS ENCOUNTER WITH EVIL
Now for a few necessary words about a smile, specifically a man's smile, and about a beard, created for the male act of smiling into one's beard; the smile of the scholars who had accepted Diotima's invitation and were listening to the famous artists. Although they were smiling, they were absolutely not to be suspected of doing so ironically. On the ~ontrary, it was their way of expressing deference and incompetence, as has already been· explained. But this, too, should fool no one. They were sincere in this, consciously; but sub- consciously, to use a fashionable term, or, better still, in the sum of their being, they were people in whom a. propensity for Evil crackled like a fire under a caldron.
This has a paradoxical ring, of course, and any of our university professors in whose presence one attempted to assert it. would proba- bly counter that he was a humble servant of truth and progress and otherwise knew nothing about anything. That is his professional ide- ology. But high-mindedness is the mark of every professional ideol- ogy. Hunters, for instance, would never dream of calling themselves the butchers of wild game; they prefer to call themselves the duly licensed friends of nature and animals; just as businessmen uphold the principle of an honorable profit, while the businessman's god, Mercury, that distinguished promoter of international relations, is also the god of thieves. So the image of a profession in the minds of its practitioners is not too reliable.
Ifwe ask ourselves dispassionately how science has arrived at its present state-an important question in itself, considering how en- tirely we are in its power and how not even an illiterate is safe from its domination, since he has to learn to live with countless things born of science-we get a different picture. Credible received wisdom in- dicates that it all began in the sixteenth century, a time of the great- est spiritual turbulence, when people ceased trying to penetrate the
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deep mysteries of nature as they had done through two millennia of religious and philosophical speculation, but were instead satisfied with exploring the surface of nature in a manner that can only be called superficial. For instance the great Galileo Galilei, always the first to· be mentioned in this connection, eliminated the question. of what were nature's deep intrinsic reasons for abhorring a vacuum and consequently letting a falling body penetrate space after space unql it finally comes to rest on solid ground, and settled for some- thing more common: he simply established how quickly such a body falls, the course it takes, the time it takes, and what is its rate of downward acceleration. The Catholic Church made a grave error in threatening this man with death and forcing him to recant instead of summarily executing him without much ceremony, since it was from his way oflooking at things, and that ofothers oflike mind, that after- ward-in next to no time, in the scale ofhistory-there arose railway timetables, industrial machines, physiological psychology, and our era's moral decay against which the Church no longer stands a chance. The Church probably erred in being overprudent, because Galileo was not only the discoverer of the law of falling bodies and the motion of the earth, but also an inventor in whom, as we would say today, major capital took an interest; besides, he was not the only one in his time who was seized by the new spirit. On the contrary, historical accounts show that the matter-of-factness that inspired him raged and spread like an infection. However disconcerting it may sound nowadays to speak of someone as inspired by matter-of-
factness, believing as we cJo that we have far too much of it, in Galileo's day the awakening from metaphysics to the hard observa- tion of reality must have been, judging by all sorts of evidence, a veri- table orgy and conflagration of matter-of-factness! But should one ask what mankind was thinking of when it made this change, the an- swer is that it did no more than what every sensible child does after trying to walk too soon; it sat. down on the ground, contacting the earth with a most dependable ifnot very noble part ofits anatomy, in short, that part on which one sits. The amazing thing is that the earth showed itself to be uncommonly receptive, and ever since that mo- ment ofcontact has allowed men to entice inventions, conveniences, and discoveries out ofit in quantities bordering on the miraculous.
Such preliminaries might lead one to think, with some justice, that
it is the miracle of the Antichrist we now find ourselves in the midst of; for the metaphor of "contact" used here is to be interpreted not only in the sense of dependability, but also just as much in the sense of the unseemly and disreputable. And in truth, before intellectuals discovered their pleasure in "facts," facts were the sole preserve of soldiers, hunters, and traders-people by nature full of violence and. cunning. The struggle for existence makes no allowance for senti- mental considerations; it knows only the desire to kill one's opponent in the quickest, most factual way; here everyone is a positivist. Nor is it a virtue in business to let oneself ~e taken in instead of going for the solid facts, since a profit is ultimately a psychological overpower- ing ofyour opponent arising from the circumstances. If, on the other hand, one looks at the qualities that lead to the making of discoveries, one finds freedom from traditional considerations and inhibitions, courage, as much initiative as ruthlessness, the exclusion of moral considerations, patience in haggling for the smallest advantage, dog- ged endurance on the way to the goal, if necessary, and a veneration for meas~re and number that expresses the keenest mistrust of all uncertainty. In other words, we find just those ancient vices of sol- diers, hunters, and traders, here merely translated into intellectual terms and interpreted as virtues. This raises them above the pursuit of personal and relatively vulgar advantage, but even in this transfor- mation the element of primal evil is not lost; ·it is seemingly inde- structible and everlasting, at least as everlasting as everything humanly sublime, since it consists of nothing less and nothing else than the urge to trip up that sublimity and watch it fall on its face. Who has never felt a nasty itch, looking at a beautifully glazed, luxuri- antly curved vase, at the thought of smashing it to bits with a single blow of one's stick? This temptation, raised to its full heroic bitter- ness-that nothing in life can be relied on unless it is firmly nailed down-is a basic feeling embedded in the sobriety of science; aqd though we are too respectable to call it the Devil, a whiff of burned horsehair still clings to it.
We can begin at once with the peculiar predilection of scientific thinking for mechanical, statistical, and physical explanations that have, as it were, the heart cut out of them. The scientific mind sees kindness only as a special form of egotism; brings emotions into line with glandular secretions; notes that eight or nine tenths of a human
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being consists ofwater; explains our celebrated moral freedom as an automatic mental by-product of free trade; reduces beauty to good digestion and the proper distribution of fatty tissue; graphs the an- nual statistical curves of births and suicides to show that our most intimate personal decisions are programmed behavior; sees a con- nection between ecstasy and mental disease; equates the anus and the mouth as the rectal and the oral openings at either end of the same tube-such ideas, which expose the trick, as it were, behind the magic of human il~usions, can always count on a kind of prejudice in their favor as being impeccably scientific. Certainly they demon- strate the love of truth. But surrounding this clear, shining love is a predilection for disillusionment, compulsiveness, ruthlessness, cold intimidation, and dry rebuke, a spiteful predilection, or at least an involuntary emanation ofsuch a kind.
To put it differently, the voice of truth is accompanied by a suspi- cious static noise to which those most closely involved turn a deaf ear. Well, contemporary psychology knows many such repressed phenomena and is ready with advice to haul them out and make them as clear as possible to oneself, to prevent their having harmful effects. How about putting it to the test, then, and trying to make an open display of that ambiguous taste for the truth, with its malicious undertones ofhuman spitefulness, its hound-of-hell attitude, letting it take its chances in'life, as it were? What might come ofthis is, more or less, that lack ofidealism already discussed under the heading ofa utopia of exact living, an attitude of experiment and revocation, but subject to the iron laws of warfare involved in all intellectual con- quests. This approach to shaping life is of course in no way nurturing or appeasing. It would regard everything worthy of life not with sim- ple veneration but rather as a line of demarcation being constantly redrawn in the battle for inner truth. It would question the sanctity of the world's momentary condition, not from skepticism but rather in the conviction of the climber that the foot with the firmer hold is always the lower one. In the fire of sl,lch a Church Militant, which hates doctrine for the sake of revelation yet to come and sets aside law and values in the name of an exacting love for their imminent new configurations, the Devil would find his way back to God or, more simply, truth would again be the sister of virtue and would no
longer have to play tricks on goodness behind its back, like a young niece with an old maiden aunt.
All that sort of thing is absorbed more or less consciously by a young man in the lecture halls of learning, along with the basics of a great, constructive way of thinking capable of bringing together with ease such disparate phenomena as a falling stone and an orbiting star, and of analyzing something as seemingly whole and indivisible as the origin of a simple act within the depths of consciousness into currents whose inner sources lie thousands ofyears apart. But should anyone presume to use such an approach outside the limits of spe- cific professional problems, he would quickly be given to understand that the needs of life are different from the requirements of thought. What happens in life is more or less the opposite of whatever the trained mind is accustomed to. Life places a very high value on natu- ral distinctions and congenialities; whatever exists, no matter what it is, is regarded up to a point as the natural thing, and not to be lightly tampered with; changes that become necessary proceed reluctantly and in a kind of two-steps-forward, one-step-back rhythm. If some- one of purely vegetarian convictions, say, were to address a cow as "Ma'am"- o n the perfectly reasonable assumption that one is likely to behave more brutally toward someone addressed with "Hey there! "-he would be called a conceited ass or even a crackpot, but not because of his vegetarian convictions or his respect for animals, which are regarded as most humane, but because he was acting them out directly in the real world. In short, what we think and what we do coexist in an intricate compromise whereby the claims of the intel- lect are paid offat the rate ofno more than so percent ofevery thou- sand, while to make up for the rest it is adorned with the title of honorary creditor.
But if the human mind, in the imposing shape that is its most re- cent manifestation, is indeed, as we have suggested, a very masculine saint with warlike and hunterlike ancillary vices, one might conclude from the circumstances described above that the mind's inherent tendency toward depravity, grandiose as it is, can neither reveal itself nor find any occasion to purge itself through contact with reality, with the result that it is likely to tum up on all sorts of quite strange, unsupervised paths by which it evades its sterile captivity. Whether
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everything up to this point has been merely a play of conceits is an open question, but there is no denying that this last surmise has its own peculiar confirmation. There is a nameless mood abroad in the world today, a feeling in the blood of more than a few people, an expectation ofworse things to come, a readiness to riot, a mistrust of everything one reveres. There are those who deplore the lack of ide- alism in the young but who, the moment they must act themselves, automatically behave no diff~rently from someone with a healthy mistrust of ideas who backs up his gentle persuasiveness with the ef- fect of some kind of blackjack. Is there, in other words, any pious intent that does not have to equip itselfwith a little bit ofcorruption and reliance on the lower human qualities in order to be taken in this world as serious and seriously meant? Terms like "bind," "force," ''put the screws on," "don't be afraid to smash windows," "take strong measures," all have the pleasant ring of dependability. Propo- sitions of the kind that the greatest philosopher, after a week in bar- racks, will learn to spring to attention at the drill sergeant's voice, or that a lieutenant ~d eight men are enough to arrest any parliament in the world, achieved their classic form only somewhat later, in the discovery that a few spoonfuls ofcastor oil poured down the throat of an idealist can make the sternest convictions look ridiculous; but long before that, and although they were disclaimed with indignation, such ideas had the savage buoyancy of sinister dreams.
It just so happens that the second thought, at the very least, of every person today confronted by an overwhelming phenomenon, even if it should be its beauty that so overwhelms him, is "You can't fool me! I'll cut you down to size! " And this mania for cutting things down to size, typical of an era that not only flees with the fox but also pursues with the hounds, has hardly anything to do any longer with life's natural separation of the raw from the sublime; it is, rather, much more a self-tormenting bent of mind, an inadmissible lust at the spectacle of the good being humiliated and too easily destroyed altogether. It is not dissimilar from some passionate desire to give the lie to oneself, and perhaps there are bleaker prospects than believing in a time that has come into the world coccyx-first and merely needs the Creator's hands to turn it around.
Much ofthis sort ofthing may be expressed by a man's smile, even when the man is not himself aware of it or it has never even gone
through his consciousness at all, and this was the sort of smile with which most of the invited celebrated experts lent themselves to Di- otlma's praiseworthy efforts. It began as a prickling sensation moving up the legs, which did not quite know in which direction they should tum, and finally landed as a look of benevolent amazement on the face. With relief one spotted an acquaintance or a colleague one could speak to. One had the feeling that going home, outside the gate, one would have to stamp firmly a few times to test the ground. Still, it was a very pleasant occasion. Such general undertakings never find a proper content, of course, like all universal and elevated concepts. One cannot even imagine the concept "dog"; the word is only a reference to particular dogs and canine qualities, and this is even more the case with "patriotism" or the loftiest patriotic ideas. But even if it has no content, it certainly has a meaning, and it is surely desirable from time to time to bring that meaning to life! This was what most of those present were communicating to one another, although mostly within the silence of the unconscious. But Diotima, still standing in the maill reception room and favoring stragglers with her little speeches of welcome, was astonished to hear what ap- peared to be lively conversations starting up on such subjects as the difference between Bohemian and Bavarian beer, or publishers' royalties.
It was too bad that she could not watch her reception from the street. From out there it looked marvelous. The light shone brightly through the curtains of the tall windows along the fa~ade of the house, heightened by the additional glow of authority and distinction emanating from the waiting cars, as well as by the gaping passersby who stopped to look up for a while without quite knowing why. Di- otima would have been pleased by the sight. There were people con- stantly standing in the half-light the festivity cast on the street; behind their backs, the great darkness began that within a short dis- tance quickly became impenetrable.
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73
LEO FISCHEL'S DAUGHTER GERDA
In all this hubbub, Ulrich kept putting off fulfilling his promise to Fischel that he would pay the family a visit. He actually never did get around to it until something unexpected happened: Fischel's wife, Clementine, came to see him.
She had phoned to announce her visit, and Ulrich awaited her not without apprehension. It had been three years since he had regularly come to their house, during a stay ofsome months in town; since his return he had been there only once, not wanting to stir up a past flirtation and dreading having to deal with a mother's disappoint- ment. But Clementine Fischel was a woman of "magnanimous spirit," with so little opportunity to exercise it in her daily petty strug- gles with her husband, Leo, that for special occasions, regrettably so rare in her life, she had reserves of truly heroic high-mindedness to draw upon. Even so, this thin woman with her austere, rather care- worn face felt a bit embarrassed when she found herself face-to-face with Ulrich, saying she needed to speak to him privately, even though they were alone as it was. But he was the only person Gerda would still listen to, she said, adding that she hoped he would not misunderstand her request.
Ulrich·was aware of the Fischel family's situation. Not only were the father and mother constantly at war, but their daughter, Gerda, already twenty-three, had surrounded herself with a swarm of odd young people who had somehow co-opted Papa Leo, who ground his teeth, as a most grudging Maecenas and backer of their "new move- ment" because his house was the most convenient for their get- togethers. Gerda was so nervous and anemic, and got so terribly upset every time anyone tried to make her see less of these friends- Clementine reported-who were, after all, just silly boys without
real breeding; still, the way they insisted on parading their mystical anti-Semitism was not only in poor taste, it revealed an inner brutal- ity. Not that she had come to complain about. anti-Semitism~ she added, which was a sign of the times, one simply had to resign one- self to it-she was even prepared to admit that in some respects there might be something in it. Clementine paused and would have dried a tear with her handkerchief had she not worn a veil; but as it was she refrained from dropping the tear, contenting herself with merely pulling her white handkerchief out of her little handbag.
"You know what Gerda's like," she said; "a beautiful and gifted girl but-"
"A bit rebellious. " Ulrich finished it for her.
"Yes, Heaven help us, always going to extremes. "
"So she's still a German Nationalist? "
Clementine spoke of the parents' feelings. "A mother's errand of
mercy" was what she somewhat pathetically called her visit, which had as its secondary'aim to entice Ulrich back as aregular visitor to their family circle, now that he was known to have risen to such emi- nence in the Parallel Campaign. "I hate myself," she went on, "for the way I encouraged Gerda's friendship with these boys in recent years, against Leo's will. I thought nothing ofit; these youngsters are idealists in their way, and an open-minded person can let the occa- sional offensive word pass. . . . But Leo-you know how he is-is upset by anti-Semitism, whether it's merely mystical or symbolic or not. "
"And Gerda, in her free-spirited, Germanic, blond fashion, won't recognize the problem? " Ulrich rounded it out.
"She's the same as I was at her age in this respect. Do you think, by the way, that Hans Sepp has any prospects? "
"Is Gerda engaged to him? " Ulrich asked cautiously.
"That boy has no means whatever ofproviding for her," Clemen- tine sighed. "How can you talk of an engagement? But when Leo ordered him out ofthe house Gerda ate so little for three weeks run- ning that she turned to skin and bone. " All at once, she broke out angrily: "You know, it seems to me like hypnosis, like some sort of spiritual infection! That boy incessantly expounds his philosophy under our roof, and Gerda never notices the continual insult to her parents in it, even though she's always been a good and affectionate
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child otherwise. But whenever I say anything, she answers: 'You're so old-fashioned, Mama. ' So I thought-you're the only man who counts for something with her, arid Leo thinks the world. of you! - couldn't you come over and try to open Gerda's eyes to the callow- ness of Hans and his cronies? "
For such a model of propriety as Clementine to resort to so ag- gressive a tactic could only mean that she was seriously worried. Whatever their conflicts, she was inclined to a certain solidarity with her husband in this situation. Ulrich raised his eyebrows in concern.
''I'm afraid Gerda will canme old-fashioned too. These new young people pay no attention to us elders on such matters of principle. "
"It occurred to me that the easiest way to distract Gerda might be your fmding something for her to do in that patriotic campaign of yours everyone is talking about," Clementine offered, and Ulrich hastened to promise her a visit, even while assuring her that the P~­ allel Campaign was far from being ready for such uses.
When Gerda saw him coming through the door a few days after- ward, two circular red spots appeared on her cheeks, but she ener- geticallyshookhishand. Shewasoneofthosecharminglypurposeful young women of our time who would instantly become bus drivers if some higher purpose called for it.
Ulrich had not been mistaken in the assumption that he would find her alone; it was the hour when Mama was out shopping and Papa was still at the office. Ulrich had hardly taken his first steps into the room when he was overcome with a sense of deja vu, everything so reminded him of a particular day during their earlier times to- gether. It had been a few weeks later in the year then, still spring but one ofthose piercingly hot days that sometimes precede the summer like burning embers, hard for the still unseasoned body to bear. Gerda's face had looked haggard and thin. She was dressed in white and smelled white, like linen dried on meadow grass. The blinds were down in all the rooms, and the whole apartment was full of re- bellious half-lights and arrows ofheat whose points were broken off from piercing through the sack-gray barrier. Ulrich felt that Gerda's body was made up entirely of the same fresh~y washed linen hang- ings as her dress. He felt this quite without emotion and could have calmly peeled layer after layer off her, without needing the least erotic ·stimulus to egg him on. He had the very same feeling again
this time. Theirs seemed to be a perfe~tlynatural but pointless inti- macy, and they both feared it.
"Why did it take you so long to come see us? " Gerda asked.
Ulrich told her straight out that her parents would surely not wish them to be so close unless they intended to many.
"Oh, Mama," Gerda said. "Mama's absurd. So we're not supposed to be friends if we don't instantly think about that! But Papa wants you to come often; you're said to be quite somebody in that big affair. "
She came out with this quite openly, this foolishness of the old folk, secure in her assumption that she and Ulrich were naturally in league against it.
"I'll come," Ulrich replied, "but now tell me, Gerda, where does that leave us? " ·
The point was, they did not love each other. They had played a lot of tennis together, met at social functions, gone out together, taken an interest in each other, and thus unawares had crossed the border- line that separates an intimate friend whom we allow to see us in all our inward disorder from those for whom we cultivate our appear- ance. They had unexpectedly become as close as two people who have loved each other for a long time, who in fact almost no longer love each other, without actually going through love. They were al-
. \. vays arguing, so it looked as if they did not care for each other, but it was both an obstacle and a bond between them. They knew that with all this it would only take one spark to start a big fire. Had there been less of a difference in their ages, or had Gerda been a married woman, then "opportunity. would probably have created the thief," and the theft might have led, at least afterward, to passion, since we talk ourselves into love as we talk ourselves into a rage, by making the proper gestures. But just because they knew all this, they did not do it. Gerda had remained a virgin, and furiously resented it.
Instead of answering Ulrich's question, she had busied herself about the room, when suddenly he stood beside her. That was reck- less of him, because one can't stand so close to a girl at such a mo- ment and just start talking about something. They followed the path of least resistance, like a brook that, avoiding obstacles, flows down a meadow, and Ulrich put his arm around Gerda's hip so that his fin- gertips reached the precipitate downward line of the inside elastic
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that follows from garter belt to stocking. He turned up Gerda's face, with its confused and slightly sweaty look, and kissed her on the lips. ;rhen they stood still, unable to let go or come together. His finger- tips connected with the broad elastic of her garter belt and let it snap gently against her thigh a few times. Then he tore himself away and with a shrug asked her again:
"Where do we go from here, Gerda? "
Gerda fought down her excitement and said: "Is this how it has to be? ''
She rang for refreshments; she set the household in motion.
"Tell me something about Hans," Ulrich asked her gently, when they had sat down and had to begin the conversation again. Gerda, who had not quite regained her poise, did not answer at first, but after a while she said: "You're so pleased with yourself, you'll never understand younger people like . us. "
"Sticks and stones . . . ,"Ulrich said evasively. "I think, Gerda, that I'm done with science now. Which means that I am niaking common cause with the younger generation. Is it enough to swear to you that knowledge is akin to greed?
That it is a shabby form of thriftiness? A supercilious kind of spiritual capitalism? There is more feeling in me than you think. But I want to spare you the kind of talk that amounts to nothing but words. "
"You must get to know Hans bett~r," Gerda replied weakly, then she erupted again: "Anyway, you'd never understand that it's possi- ble to fuse with others into a community, without any thought of yourself! "
"Does Hans still come so often? " Ulrich asked warily. Gerda shrugged her shoulders.
Her shrewd parents had refrained from forbidding Hans Sepp the house altogether; he was allowed to come a few days every month. In tum Hans Sepp, the student who was nothing and had as yet no pros- pect of becoming something, had to promise not to make Gerda do anythingsheshouldn't,andtosuspendhisprop~gandizingforsome . mystical, Germanic action. In this way they hoped to rob him of the charm of forbidden fruit. And Hans'Sepp in his chastity (only the sensual man wants to possess, but then sensuality is a Jewish-capital- istic trait) had calmly given his word as requested, without, however,· taking it to mean that he would give up his frequent secret comings
and goings, making incendiary speeches, hotly pressing Gerda's hands or even kissing her, all of which still comes naturally to soul- mates. but only that he would refrain from advocating sexual union without benefit of clergy or civic authority, which he had been ad- vocating, but on a purely theoretical plane. He had pledged hi_s word all the more readily as he did not feel that he and Gerda were spiritu- ally mature enough as yet to turn his principles into action; setting up a barrier to the temptations of the baser instincts was quite in line with his way of thinking. .
But the two young people naturally suffered under these restraints imposed on them before they had found their own inner discipline. Gerda especially would not have put up with such interference from her parents, had it not been for her own uncertainties; this made her resentment all the greater. She did not really love her young friend all that much; it was more a matter of translating her opposition to her parents into an attachment to him. Had Gerda been born some years later than she was, her papa would have been one of the richest men in town, even if not too highly regarded as a result, and her mother would have admired him again, before Gerda could have been of an age to experience the bickerings of her progenitors as a conflict within herself. She would then probably have taken pride in being of"racially mixed" parentage; but as things stood, she rebelled against her parents and their problems, did not want to be. genetically tainted by them, and was blond, free, Germanic, and forceful, as if she had. nothing at all to do with them. This solution, as good as it looked, had the disadvantage that she had never got around to bring- ing the worm that was gnawing at her inwardly out into the light of day. In her home, nationalism and racism were treated as nonexis- tent, even though they were convulsing half of Europe with hysteri- cal ideas and everything in ·the Fischel household in particular turned on nothing else. Whatever Gerda knew of it had come to her from the outside, in the dark form of rumors, suggestion, and exag- geration. The paradox of her parents-who normally reacted strongly to anything talked about by many people-making so nota- ble an exception in this case had made a deep impression early in her life, and since she attached no definite, objective meaning to this ghostly presence, she tended to connect with it everything disagree- able and peculiar in her home life, especially during her adolescence.
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One day she met the Christian-Gennanic circle ofyoung people to which Hans Sepp belonged, and suddenly felt she had found her true home. It wou:ld be hard to say what these young people actually believed in; they fonned one of those innumerable undefined "free- spirited" little sects that have infested Gennan youth ever since the breakdown of the humanistic ideal. They were not racial anti-Sem- ites but opponents of "the Jewish mind," by which they meant capi- talism and socialism, science, reason, parental authority and parental arrogance, calculation, psychology, and skepticism. Their basic doc- trinal device was the "symbol"; as far as Ulrich could make out, and he had, after all, some understanding of such things, what they meant by "symbol" was the great images ofgrace, which made every- thing that is confused and dwarfed in life, as Hans Sepp put it, clear and great, images that suppress the noise of the senses and dip the forehead in streams of transcendence. Such symbols were the Isen- heim Altar, the Egyptian pyramids, and Novalis; Beethoven and Ste- fan George were acceptable approximations. But they did not state, in so many words, what a symbol was: first, because a symbol cannot be expressed in so many words; second, because Aryans do not deal in dry fonnulas, which is why they achieved only approximations of symbols during the last century; and third, because some centuries only rarely produce the transcendent moment of grace in the tran- scendent human being.
Gerda, who was no fool, secretly felt not a little distrust toward these overblown sentiments, but she also distrusted her distrust, in which she thought she detected the legacy of her parents' rational- ism. Behind her fa~ade of independence she was anxiously at pains to disobey her parents, in dread that her bloodlines might hinder her from following Hans's ideas. She felt deeply mutinous against the taboos girding the morals of her so-called good family and against the arrogant parental rights of intrusion that threatened to suffocate ~er personality, while Hans, who had "no family at all," as her mother put it, suffered much less than she did; he had emerged from her circle of companions as Gerda's "spiritual guide," passionately ha- rangued the girl, who was as old as he was, trying to transport her, with his tirades accompanied by kisses, into the "region of the Un- conditional," though in practice he was quite adept at coming to tenns with the conditioned state of the Fischel household, as long as
he was permitted to reject it "on principle," which of course always led to rows with Papa Leo.
"My dear Gerda," Ulrich said after a while, "your friends tor- ment you about your father-they really are the worst kind of blackmailers! "
Gerda turned pale, then red. "You are no longer young yourself," she replied. ''You think differently from us. " She lmew that she had stung Ulrich's vanity, and added in a conciliatory tone: "I don't ex- pect much from love anyway. Maybe I am wasting my time with Hans, as you say; maybe I have to resign myself altogether to the idea that I'll never love anyone enough to open every crevice of my soul to him: my thoughts and feelings, work and dreams; I don't even think that would be so very awful. "
"How wise beyond your years you sound, Gerda, when you talk like your friends," Ulrich broke in.
Gerda was annoyed. "When I talk with my friends," she said, "our thoughts flow from one to the other, and we lmow that we live and speak as one with our people-do you have any idea what this means? We stand with countless others ofour own kind, we feel their presence, in a sensory, physical way I'm sure you've never . . . In fact, you can't even imagine such a thing, can you? Your desire has always been for asingle person; you think like a beast ofprey! "
Why a beast of prey? Her words hung in midair, giving her away; she realized their senselessness and felt ashamed of her eyes, wide with fear, which were staring at Ulrich.
"Let's not go into that," Ulrich said gently. "Let me tell you a story instead. Do you know"-he drew her closer with his hand, inside which her wrist disappeared like a child among high crags-"the sensational story of the capture of the moon? You know, of course, that long ago our earth had several moons. And there's a very popular theory that such moons are not what we take them for, cosmic bodies that have cooled like the earth itself, but great globes of ice rushing through space that have come too close to the earth and are held fast by it. Our moon is said to be the last of them. Come and have a look at it! "
Gerda had followed him to the window and looked for the pale moon in the sunny sky.
"Doesn't it look like a disk ofice? " Ulrich asked. "That's no source
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of light. Have you ever wondered why the man in the moon always faces us the sam~. way? Our last moon is no long~rturning on its axis, that's why; it's already fixed in place! You see, once the moon has come into the earth's po-. yer it doesn't merely revolve around the earth but is drawn steadily closer. We don't notice it because it takes thousands of years or even longer for the screw to tighten. But there's no getting away from it, and there must have been thousands of years in the history of the earth during which the previous moons were drawn very close and went on racing in orbit with incredible speed. And just as our present moon pulls a tide from three to six feet high after it, an earlier one would have dragged in its wake whole mountain ranges of water and mud, tumbling all over the globe. We can hardly imagine the terror in which generation after generation must have lived on such a crazy earth for thousands upon thousands of years. "
"But were there . human beings on earth already? " Gerda asked.
"Certainly. In the end, such an ice moon cracks up, comes crash- ing down like giant hailstones, and the mountainous flood it has been dragging along in its orbit collapses and covers the whole globe with one vast tidal wave before it settles down again: That's nqne other than the great biblical Flood, meaning a great universal inundation! How else could all the myths be iu such agreement, if mankind hadn't experienced it all? And since we have one moon left, such ages are bound to come once more. It's a strange thought. . . . "
Gerda gazed breathlessly out c;>f the window and up at the moon; her hand was still resting in his, the moon was a pale, ugly stain on the sky, and it was precisely this unassuming presence that made this fantastic cosmic adventure-of which she somehow saw herself as the victim-look like an ordinary, everyday reality.
"But there's no truth at all to this story," Ulrich said. "The experts call it a crackpot theory, and the moon isn't really coming any closer to the earth; it is, in fact, thirty-two kilometers farther from us than it should be, according to our calculations, if I remember it right. "
"Then why did you tell me this story? " Gerda asked, and tried to extricate her hand from his. But her defiance had quite run out of steam, as it always did when she spoke with this man, who was cer-. tainly not Hans's intellectual inferior and yet managed to keep from going to extremes in his Views, to keep his fingernails clean and his
hair combed. Ulrich noticed the fine black down growing like a con- tradiction on Gerda's fair skin; the tiny hairs sprouting from her body seemed to bespeak the variously composite nature of poor modem mankind.
"I don't really know," he replied. "Shall I come and see you again? "
Gerda took out the excitement of her liberated hand on various small objects, which she pushed this way and that, without saying anything.
"See you soon, then," Ulrich promised, although this had not been his intention before he came.
74
THE FOURTH CENTURY B. C. VERSUS THE YEAR 1797· ULRICH RECEIVES ANOTHER LETTER FROM HIS FATHER
The rumor had quickly spread that the meetings at Diotima's were an extraordinary success. And now Ulrich received an unusually long letter from his father, stuffed with enclosed pamphlets and offprints. The letter read more or less like this:
My dear son:
Your extended silence . . .
However, I have had the pleasure ofhearing from another
source that my efforts on your behalf . . . my kind friend Count Stallburg . . . His Grace Count Leinsdorf . . . our kinswoman the wife of Section ChiefTuzzi . . . And now I must ask you, if you
· will, to use all your influence in your new circle in the following matter:
The world would come apart if everything held to be true were indeed to be accepted as such and every will could have its way
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as long as it seems to itself legitimate. All of us are therefore duty-bound to determine the one truth and the proper aim; then, insofar as we have succeeded in so doing, to take care, with an unflinching sense of our duty, that it is set down in the clear form of scientific thought. You may gather from this what it means when I tell you that in lay circles, but also, sad to say, in scientific circles susceptible to the promptings of a confused age, an extremely dangerous movement has been afoot for a long time to bring about certain presumed reforms and ameliorations in the proposed revision of the penal code. To fill you in, a committee of noted experts has been in existence for a number of years, appointed by the Minister of Justice to draw up such a proposed revision, to which committee I have the honor to belong, as does my university colleague Professor Schwung, whom you inay remember from earlier days before I had seen through him, so thatfor many years he could pass as my best friend. As regards the liberalizations mentioned above, a rumor has reached me-unfortunately only too likely to be true! -that in the approaching jubilee year of our revered and merciful sovereign, exploiting, as it were, all inclinations to magnanimity, special efforts are likely to be made to pave the way for just such a disastrous emasculation of our legal system. It goes without saying that Professor Schwung and I are equally resolved to forestall this.
I realize that you are not versed in legal matters, but the chances are you know that the method of breaching our fortifications most favored by the present tendency to legal obfuscation, which falsely dubs itself humanitarianism, consists in the effort to extend the concept of mental impairment, for which punishment is not in order, in the vague form of diminished responsibility, even to those numerous individuals who are neither insane nor morally normal: that army of inferior persons the morally feebleminded, which sadly enough constitutes one of the ever-growing diseases of our civilization. You will see for yourself that this concept of diminished responsibility-if you
can call it a concept, which I contest-is most intimately connected with the manner in which we interpret the concepts of
full responsibility, or irresponsibility, as the case may be, and this brings me to the point of this letter:
Proceeding from already existing formulations of the law, and in view of the circumstances cited, I have proposed to the previously mentioned planning committee the following version of Paragraph 318 of our future penal code:
"No criminal act has been committed if the perpetrator was in a state of unconsciousness or pathological disturbance of his mind at the time he was engaged in the act under consideration, so that-" and Professor Schwung submitted a proposal beginning with exactly the same words.
But then he continued as follows: "so that he could not exercise his free will," while mine was to read: "so that he did not have the capacity to perceive the wrongfulness of his act. " I must admit that I did not at first realize the malicious intent of this contradiction. My personal view has always been this, that as the intellect and reasoning power develops, the will comes to dominate desires or instincts by way of considered thoughts and the decisions springing from them. Any willed act is accordingly always the result of prior thought and not purely instinctive. Man is free insofar as he has the power of choice in the exercise of his will; when under the influence of human cravings, that is to say, cravings prompted by his sensual nature which interfere with his ability to think clearly, then he is not free. Volition is simply not a matter of chance but an act of self-determination arising necessarily from within the person, and so the will is determined by thought, and when the thought process is disturbed, the will is no longer the will, as the man's action is prompted only by his natural cravings. . I am ofcourse aware that the opposite view is also represented in the literature, i. e. , that thought is regarded as being determined by the will. This is a view, however, that has its adherents among modem jurists only since 1797, while the one I hold has stood up to all attacks since the fourth century B. C. But to show that I was willing to meet my colleague halfway, I put forward a formulation that would join both proposals, as follows:
"No criminal act shall have been committed if the offender was at the time of his act in a state of unconsciousness or a
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morbid disturbance ofhis mental activity, so that he did not have the capacity to perceive the wrongfulness of his act and could not exercise his free will. "
But here Professor Schwung revealed himself in his true colors! Showing no appreciation whatsoever of my willingness to meet him halfway, he arrogantly insisted that the "and" in my statement had to be replaced with an "or. " You see the point? What differentiates the thinker from the layman is precisely this fine distinction of an "or" where the layman simply puts an "and," and Schwung was trying to stigmatize me as a superficial thinker by exposing my readiness to find a compromise, using the "and" to unite both formulations, exposing it to the suspicion that I had failed to grasp the full magnitude ofthe difference to be bridged, with all its implications!
It goes without saying that from that moment on I have rigorously opposed him on every point.
I immediately withdrew my compromise proposal and have had to insist on the acceptance of my first version without any compromise whatsoever; since when, however, Schwung has been making trouble for me with a most perfidious ingenuity. He claims, for instance, that under my proposed version, which is based on the capacity to recognize a wrongful act as such, a person who suffers from special delusions but is otherwise normal, as sometimes happens, could be exonerated on grounds of mental illness only if it could be proved that this person had assumed, because of his delusions, the existence of circumstances under which his act would be justified or not punishable under the law, so that he would have been acting correctly, although within a false concept of reality. This objection has no merit at all, however, for while empirical logic recognizes the existence of persons who are partly insane and partly sane, the logic of the law must never admit such a mixture ofjuridical states; before the law, a person is either respons. ible for his actions or not responsible, and we may assume that even in persons suffering from special kinds of delusions, a general capacity to know right from wrong still ~sts. If this is blurred by delusions in a specific instance, it needs only a special effort of the intelligence to bring
it into harmony with the rest of the personality, and there is no reason to see any special problem in that.
And so I immediately pointed out to Professor Schwung that if the state of being responsible and that of not being responsible for one's actions cannot logically exist simultaneously, these states must be assumed to follow each other in rapid alternation, giving rise to the problem, especially where his theory is concerned, from which ofthese alternating states has the act in question resulted? To determine this, you would have to cite all the influences to which the accused has been subjected since his birth, and everything that may have influenced the actions of all his forebears, from whom his good and bad trafts are inherited.
You will hardly believe this, but Schwung actually had the cheek to retort that this was quite so, as the logic of the law must never admit a mixture of two juridical states with respect to one and the same act, so that it is necessary to decide even with regard to each specific act of volition whether it was possible for the accused, in the light of his psychological history, to control his will or not. He chooses to claim that we are far more clearly aware of our free will than of the fact that everything that happens has a cause, and as long as we are basically free, we are also free with respect to specific causes, so that we must assume that in such a case it only requires a special effort of the will to resist the causally determined criminal impulses.
At this point Ulrich desisted from further exploration of his fa- ther's plans and pensively hefted in his hand the many enclosures cited in the letter's margin. Casting one more hasty glance at the let- ter's conclusion, he learned that his father expected him to use his "objective influence" on Counts Leinsdorf and Stallburg, and strongly advised him to warn the appropriate committees of the Par- allel Campaign in good time of the dangers to the spiritual founda- tion of the entire government should so important a problem be wrongly formulated and resolved in the Year of the Jubilee.
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75
GENERAL STUMM VON BORDWEHR CONSIDERS VISITS TO DIOTIMA AS A DELIGHTFUL CHANGE FROM HIS USUAL RUN OF DUTY
The tubby little General had paid Diotima another visit. Although the soldier has but a modest part to play in the council chamber, he began by saying, he would take it upon himself to predict that the state is the power to hold one's own in the struggle among nations, and that the military strength displayed in peacetime wards off war. But Diotima had instantly pulled him up short.
"General," she said, quivering with indignation, "all of life de- pends upon the forces of peace; even the life of business, rightly re- garded, is a form of poetry. "
The little General stared at her for a moment, dumbfounded, but soon regained his seat in the saddle.
"Your Excellency . . . ,"he hastened to agree. In order to under- stand this form of address, we must remember that Diotima's hus- band was a ministerial section chief, and that in Kakania a section chief held the same rank as divisional commanders, who alone were entitled to be addressed as Excellency and only when on duty, at that; but since the soldier's profession is a knightly one, no soldier could expect to advance his career without so addressing them even when off duty, and in the spirit of chivalrous striving one also ad- dressed their wives as Excellency, without wasting much thought on the question of when they were on duty. Such intricate considera- tions flashed through the little General's mind and enabled him tq reassure Diotima instantly, with his first words, of his unqualified agreement and humble devotion, as he said, "Your Excellency takes the words out of my mouth. It goes without saying that, for political reasons, the W ar Ministry could not have been considered when the committees were set up, but we heard that the great movement is to be pacifist in it~aims-an international·peace campaign, they say, or
perhaps the donation of Austrian murals to the Peace Palace at The Hague-and I can assure Your Excellency of our entire sympathy with such an aim. People generally tend to have certain misconcep- tions about the military; of course I won't deny that a young lieuten- ant is likely to yearn for a war, but all responsible quarters are most deeply convinced that the sphere of force, which we unfortunately do represent, must be linked with the blessings of the human spirit, precisely as Your Excellency has just put it. "
He now dug a little brush out of his trouser pocket and went over his little mustache with it a number oftimes; it was a bad habit dating back to his time as a cadet, a phase during which the mustache still stands for life's impatiently awaited great hope, and he was totally unaware of it. His big brown eyes were Hxed on Diotima's face, try- ing to read the effect of his words: Diotima seemed mollified, though in his presence she never quite was, and deigned to fill him in on what had been going on since the Hrst meeting. The general showed enthusiasm, especially for the Great Council, expressed his admira- tion for Arnheim, and declared his conviction that such a gathering was bound to bear splendid fruit.
"There are so many people, after all, who don't realize how little order there is in the world of the mind," he explained. "I am even convinced, if Your Excellency will permit me to say so, that most people suppose they are seeing some progress in the order of things every day. They see order everywhere: in the factories, the offices, the railway timetables, the schools-here I may also mention proudly our oWn. barracks, which in their modest way positively recall the discipline of a good orchestra-and no matter where you lo. ok, you will see order of some kind, rules and regulations for pedestri- ans, drivers, taxation, churches, business, social protocol, etiquette, morality, and so on. I'm sure that almost everyone considers our era the best-ordered of all time. Don't you have this feeling too, deep down, Your Excellency? I certainly do. If I'm not very careful, I let myself be overcome by the feeling that the modern spirit rests pre- cisely on such a greater order, and that the great empires of Nineveh and Rome fell only because somehow they let things slide. That's
what I think most people feel; they go on the unspoken assumption that the past is dead and gone as a punishment for something that got out of order. But of course that's a delusion that people who know
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their history shouldn't succu~b to. It's why, unfortunateiy, we can't do without power and the soldier's profession. "
It was deeply gratifying to the General to chat like this with this brilliant young woman; what a delightful change from the usual run of his official duties. But Diotima had no idea how to answer him, so she fell back on repeating herself:
'W e really do hope to bring the most distinguished minds to bear on it, though our task even then will be a hard one. You can't imagine what a great variety of suggestions keep pouring in, and we do want to make the best choices. But you were speaking of order, General. We will· never reach our goal through order, by a sober weighing of pros and cons, comparisons and tests. Our solution must come as a flash of lightning, a fire, an intuition, a synthesis! Looking at the his- tory of mankind, we see no logical development; what it does sug- gest, with its sudden flashes of inspiration, the meaning of which emerges only later on, is a great poem! " .
"If I may say so, Your Excellency," the General replied, "a soldier knows very little about poetry; but if anyone can breathe lightning and fire into a movement, it is Your Excellency; that much an old army officer can understand. "
COUNT LEINSDORF HAS HIS DOUBTS
So far the tubby little General had been quite urbane, even though he had come uninvited to see her, and Diotima had confided more to him than she had intended. What made her fear him nonetheless, so that she aftexward regretted again her amiability to him, was not re- ally his doing but, as Diotima told herself, her old friend Count Leinsdorf's. Could His Grace be jealous? And if so, of whom? Al- though he always put in a brief appearance at meetings, Leinsdorf did not seem as favorably inclined to the Council as Diotima had ex-
pected. His Grace was decidedly averse to what he called mere liter- ature. It stood for something he associated with Jews, newspapers, sensation-hungry booksellers, and the liberal, hopelessly garrulous paid hirelings of the bourgeoisie; the expression "mere literature" had positively become his new signature phrase. Every time Ulrich offered to read him the latest proposals that had come in the mail, including all the suggestions for moving the world forward or back- ward, he would cut him off with the words everyone uses when in addition to his own plans he hears about those everyone else has:
"No, no, I'm busy today, and all that is mere literature anyway. "
What he was thinking of, in contrast to mere literature, was fields, the men who worked them, little country churches, and that great order of things which God had bound as firmly together as the sheaves on a mown field, an order at once comely, sound, and re- warding, even if it did sometimes tolerate distilleries on country es- tates because one had to keep pace with the times. Given this tranquil breadth of outlook, gun clubs and dairy cooperatives, no matter how far from the great centers they were to be found, must appear as part and parcel of that solid order and community; and if they should be moved to make a claim on general philosophical prin- ciples, that claim must enjoy the priority of a duly registered spiritual property, as it were, over any spiritual claims put forward by private individuals. This is why, every time Diotima wanted to speak with him seriously about something she had gleaned from her Great Minds, Count Leinsdorf was usually holding in his hand, or pulling out of his pocket, some petition from a club of five simpletons, saying that this paper weighed more in the world of real problems than the bright ideas of some genius.